“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in the ...”

“... and stability with Leviathan unbound rather than with an unusual degree of constitutional liberty. John Brewer’s paean to the ‘fiscal-military state’ is the most impressive analysis of the way 18th-century Britain actually worked since Lewis Namier anatomised its parliamentary and electoral system in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George ...”

“... British punishment of blowing ‘natives’ away by tying the malefactor over the mouth of a cannon and firing it – a practice, as one of the soldiers testified, that at first sight or hearing may seem pretty gruesome, but you soon get used to it. He promises and delivers ‘prurience’, makes his jokes, and in general carries one along by high ...”

“... imperialism, things were more complicated. In Washington’s eyes, the Jewish state was a loose cannon; acute Israeli sensitivity to its own security fostered a tendency to shoot first and worry about the consequences later. Restraining Israel without either delivering it into the clutches of those committed to its destruction or provoking its impassioned ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... Berkeley, where he taught in 1970-71. Berkeley, too, had violence (‘the draft card and the water cannon’) but American poetry, American students, even American hippies and popular culture, showed how an assertive response could be made: ‘I was taller and freer in myself at the end of the year than at the beginning.’ Daily life there ‘added up to one ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... not a department store.’ Hitler correctly insisted that his tanks should have a high-velocity cannon, a stricture which the military-procurement bureaucracy blithely ignored for some time. It must be said that there are no comparable cases of insubordination under Stalin. Like Hitler, Stalin had demanded a strategy of no withdrawals in the bad years. If ...”

“... by men, and enacted by men … Law can no more rule us by itself, without human agency, than a cannon can dominate a city without an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... happened was another. (It proved to be a lengthy and difficult business for the military historian John Kaye, who died in 1876 before completing his still standard History of the Sepoy War in India: in three volumes he had taken the narrative only to the end of 1857. More recently, Andrew Ward’s moving account of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 ...”

“... of the war to report that ‘the A-10 saved my ass.’ Armed with a quick-firing heavy-calibre cannon and designed to survive damage from anti-aircraft fire, the plane enabled pilots to fly low, selecting targets on the basis of their own observation, without the fallible intervention of radar and other sensors. This highly effective weapon had emerged ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”